Face-to-face Social Behaviors

Face to face interactions brings about several behaviors that send a message to communicators. As a medical specialist, my patients display eye contact, gestures, facial expressions, and body posture during our interactions. These behaviors improve patients’ care and leadership. Some valuable face to face social behaviors include eye contact, facial expression, gestures, and body positioning.

One of the social behavior displayed during my interactions is eye contact. For example, keen eye contact is maintained when explaining how to take a certain drug and the dose they are supposed to take and at what particular time. Similarly, as a specialist, I maintain eye contact when my patient is explaining their problems to me. This helps me analyze their problems and what type of medications they need. Eye contact helps regulate the flow of communication (Edunote, 2020). It helps me maintain a mutual understanding with my patients, and thus managing become very easy. Similarly, when communicating with my peers, for instance, when consulting them, we develop a rapport.

Another behavior is facial expressions. During interactions with my patients and peers, their faces reveal a lot. They demonstrate happiness, sorrow, confusion, or interest. For instance, sometimes back, I was talking with one of my cancer patients. She had just started showing signs of breast cancer. The facial expressions she was sending indicated that she was sorrowful. She kept her mouth closed, and the forehead lowered throughout the conversation. Recognizing such behaviors is crucial because I will be able to know how they feel and offer assistance, such as counseling. Furthermore, it will positively impact on specialists being able to monitor their patients’ recovery patterns. This will keep the leadership of healthcare on point because the medical specialist can monitor their patients just by looking at their faces.

The third social behavior is gestures. These are deliberate movements and signals that one does rather than talking (Cherry, 2020). Patients tend to show gestures such as nodding their heads and raising their hands. For example, when speaking to a patient or my colleague, and they nod their head horizontally, I will understand that it is either they disagree or have not understood what I am saying. Similarly, I may use hand gestures while speaking with my patients or colleagues. Hand gestures tend to make a conversation active, and both of us will remain active throughout the conversation (Triggers, 2018). Early in my career, I had a conversation with my colleague, and he was speaking with many gestures. He could move his hands to make me understand what he was saying, and I found that very interesting. Therefore, knowing the type of gestures patients and colleagues use during interactions enables one to understand better and keeps the conversation active.

The last behavior is posture and body orientation of my patients and peers. How they sit, stand, and walk affects our interactions. For example, if a patient sits while leaning on a chair uncomfortably, it means they are tired, and probably they do not understand anything. If I am not keen, I may assume that I am delivering my point home, which may lead to poor services or handling of patients. On the other hand, sitting or standing upright means that they are keen and interested in what I am saying. Thus, being able to recognize such behaviors will enable me to come up with another strategy of handling my patient. The alternative strategy must have the advantage of bettering my services to patients or peers.

To sum up, eye contact, facial expression, gestures, and body positioning affect my profession daily. They are imperative when it comes to improving patients’ care and leadership in healthcare—being able to recognize eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, and posture help in providing better services through communication and leading patients.

References

Cherry, K. (2020, July 27). What are the 9 types of nonverbal communication you might be missing? Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/types-of-nonverbal-communication-2795397

Edunote. (2020, April 16). Nonverbal communication: Definition, Types, importance (Explained). Retrieved from https://www.iedunote.com/nonverbal-communication

Triggers, S. (2018, March 16). How to use hand gestures to communicate in a powerful way. Retrieved from https://socialtriggers.com/21-hand-gestures-for-powerful-communication/